Twins put universe in perspective via interactive display

Two California teens are allowing people to see many items in the universe from a whole new perspective.

Cary Huang, 14, and his twin brother Michael have created an online interactive display that shows the scale of many things and shows how they relate to each other.

Called "Scale of the Universe", it shows items as small as a neutrino to items as big as Eridanus Supervoid and hundreds of other things in between such as Earth, the Titanic, humans and a basketball. The page takes a few seconds to load, but once it's up and running, the user just scrolls the mouse wheel to see how various items relate to each other by size. You can even click on the items to see its size and read some interesting facts.

Cary got the idea for the project after seeing a video in school.

"My seventh grade science teacher showed us a size comparison video on cells, and I thought it was fascinating. I decided to make my own interactive version that included a much larger range of sizes," said Cary in an email forwarded by his mother, which appears in an ABC article. "It was not a school project - just for fun. However, my science teacher loved it so much she showed [it] to the class!"

Cary said his brother Michael provided technical support and helped him put it on the Internet.

The project has been in the making for a year and a half and Cary told ABC he found out much of the information from Wikipedia and astronomy books.

The project is actually called "The Scale of the Universe 2" because it is Cary's second version. This newest version includes more information on items and better graphics.

Cary and Michael tell ABC they're not sure what they plan to do when finishing school, but are interested in computer programming, animation and astronomy.

As for what they learned, they tell ABC, "I would like to say that humankind is a very small part of the universe we live in. There could be so much more out there, but we just don't know it yet."

Check out a video of the project below.

(Image a screen capture from the Huang twins' display)